‘Three Choices’ and the bitter harvest of denial: How dissimulation about Islam is fueling genocide in the Middle East

Republished by permission.
Also see summary and comment by Jenny Taylor here.

In
northern Iraq religious genocide is reaching end-game stage. Islamic
State (IS) soldiers, reinforced with military equipment originally supplied by
the US, are driving back Kurdish defenders who had been protecting Christians
and other religious minorities. While hundreds of thousands of refugees
have been fleeing into Kurdistan, around 40,000 Yazidis and some Christians are
trapped on Mount Sinjar, surrounded by IS jihadis. (Yazidis are Kurdish
people whose pre-Christian faith derives from ancient Iranian religious
traditions, with overlays and influences from other religions.)

The
Assyrian Aid Society of Iraq has reported that children and
the elderly are dying of thirst on Sinjar. Parents are throwing their
children to their deaths off the mountain rather than see them die of thirst or
be taken into slavery by IS.

The
IS jihadis are killing the men they capture. In one recent incident 1500
men were executed in front of their wives and families. In another
incident 13 Yazidi men who refused to convert to Islam had their eyes plucked
out, were doused with gasoline and burned alive. When the men are killed,
captured women and children are enslaved to be used for sex, deployed as human
shields in battle zones, or sold to be used and abused as their new owners see
fit.

The
United States has ironically called for greater cooperation. UN Ambassador,
Samantha Power, urged ‘all parties to
the conflict’ to allow access to UN relief agencies. She called on Iraqis to
‘come together’ so that Iraq will ‘get back on the path to a peaceful future’
and ‘prevent ISIL from obliterating Iraq’s vibrant diversity’.

Of
course it is not ‘vibrant diversity’ which is being wiped out in Iraq, but men,
women and children by their tens of thousands. This is not about the
failure of coexistence, and the problem is not ‘conflict’. This is not about
people who have trouble getting on and who need to somehow make up and ‘come
together’. It is about a well-articulated and well-documented theological worldview
hell-bent on dominating ‘infidels’, if necessary wiping them off the face of
the earth, in order to establish the power and grandeur of a radical vision of
Islam.

The
American administration, according to
Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute, ‘withholds arms from the Kurds
while awaiting a new, unified Iraqi government with a new prime minister.
Meanwhile … no Iraqi troops are in Nineveh province.’ Only at a few
minutes to midnight on the genocide clock has the US begun to launch
military strikes against IS forces.

These
events ought to be sobering to the West, not least because thousands of the IS jihadis were raised and
bred in the mosques of Europe, North America and Australia, not to mention the
madrassas of nations such as Malaysia, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Having
been formed by the theology of radical Islam in their home societies, would-be
jihadis are flocking to Syria and Iraq where they seek victory or martyrdom,
killing and raping as they go.

Why
is this so? How did the Arab Spring, hailed by so many armchair western
commentators as the next best thing for the Middle East, blossom bright red
into a torrent of blood?

Part
of the answer is that the West is in the grip of theological illiteracy.
It has stubbornly refused to grasp the implications of a global Islamic revival
which has been gaining steam for the best part of a century. The Islamic
Movement looks back to the glory days of conquest as Islam’s finest hour, and
seeks to revive Islamic supremacy through jihad and sacrifice. It longs
for a truly Islamic state – the caliphate reborn – and considers jihad to be
the God-given means to usher it in.

This
worldview was promoted in compelling, visionary terms by Indian scholar Abul
A’la Maududi, whose writings continue to be widely disseminated by Islamic
bookshops and mosques across the West. Maududi argued in his radicalisation
primer Let us be Muslims that the only valid form of government is
Islamic theocracy – i.e. sharia rule – and Muslims are duty-bound to use
whatever power they can muster to impose this goal on the world: ‘whoever you
are, in whichever country you live, you must strive to change the wrong basis
of government, and seize all powers to rule and make laws from those who do not
fear God. … The name of this striving is jihad.’ And ‘If you believe
Islam to be true, you have no alternative but to exert your utmost strength to
make it prevail on earth: you either establish it or give your lives in this
struggle.’

My
own copy of Let us Be Muslims, which lies open before me as I write, was
bought from a well-respected mainstream Islamic centre here in Melbourne,
Australia.

When
Pope Benedict gave a lecture in Regensburg in 2006, in which he suggested that
Islam had been spread by force, the Muslim world erupted in violent protests.

Sheikh
‘Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, responded with a revealing
defence of Islam’s record. Without a glimmer of irony he argued that the Pope
was wrong to say Islam had been spread by force, because the infidels had a
third choice, apart from death or conversion, namely to ‘surrender and pay tax,
and they will be allowed to remain in their land, observing their religion
under the protection of Muslims.’ He claimed that those who read the
Qur’an and the Sunna (the example and teaching of Muhammad) will understand the
facts.

The
reality unfolding in north Iraq today reveals to the cold light of day exactly
what the doctrine of the three choices means for conquered non-Muslims
populations, and why the dogma of the ‘three choices’ is no defence against the
assertion that Islam was spread by the sword.

It
is crystal clear that IS is not playing by the world’s rules. It has
nothing but contempt for the Geneva Convention. Its battle tactics are
regulated by sheikhs who implement the sharia’s rules of war. Many of the
abuses committed by IS being reported by the international media are taken
straight from the pages of Islamic legal textbooks.

These
words are cobbled together from the pages of Islamic sacred texts. It was
Sa'd b. Mu'adh, a companion of Muhammad, who said of the pagan Meccans ‘We will
give them nothing but the sword’ ( A. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad, OUP 1955 p. 454). Muhammad himself was
reported to have said ‘When you meet your enemies who are polytheists [i.e.
they are not Muslims] invite them to three courses of action. … Invite
them to Islam… If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the jizya. … If
they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them’ (Sahih Muslim. The Book of Jihad and Expedition [Kitab
al-Jihad wa’l-Siyar] 3:27:4294). When the Caliph ‘Umar attacked Persia,
he announced to them ‘Our Prophet [Muhammad] … has ordered us to fight you till
you worship Allah Alone or pay jizya’ (Sahih al-Bukhari, The Book of al-Jizya and the Stoppage of War 4:58:3159).

I
have analysed the doctrine of the three choices in my book The Third Choice:
Islam, dhimmitude and freedom, drawing extensively on
Islamic sources to explain the worldview of jihad and the dhimma. That
book now reads as a grim prophecy of the tragedy unfolding in Syria and Iraq.

The
Arabic word jizya is derived from a root j-z-y which refers to something given
as compensation, in substitution for something else. According to Arab
lexicographers, jizya is tribute taken from non-Muslims living under Islamic
rule ‘as though it were a compensation for their not being slain’. It is
paid by defeated communities to compensate or reward their attackers for
forgoing the right to kill, enslave or loot them.

The
nineteenth-century Algerian Qur’anic commentator Muhammad ibn Yusuf at-Fayyish
explained that jizya is ‘a satisfaction for their blood. It is … to
compensate for their not being slain. Its purpose is to substitute for the
duties of killing and slavery … It is for the benefit of Muslims.’ Over a
thousand years earlier, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub, a Hanafi jurist wrote ‘their lives
and possessions are spared only on account of the payment of the jizya.’

In
1799 William Eton, in a survey of the Ottoman empire, reported that Christians
under Ottoman rule, on paying the jizya, were addressed with a standard form of
words to the effect that ‘the sum of money received is taken as compensation
for being permitted to wear their heads that year’ (Eton’s emphasis).

To
be sure, there are other ways to interpret the Qur’an, but the point is that
this understanding of jizya has become the operative one in Northern Iraq and
Syria. It also has the backing of centuries of Islamic jurisprudence and
practice. It was with this understanding of Islam that the Middle East, South
Asia and large parts of Eastern Europe were conquered and occupied under Muslim
rule until modern times.

This
grim fact – that the IS jihadis can ably defend their theology on the basis of
Islam’s history and religious traditions – means that it will be no easy task
to persuade Muslim clerics and intellectuals to ‘debunk’ them. Such a
strategy, which has been proposed by
Peter Leahy, former head of the Australian Army, will be fraught with
difficulties. Debunking would be a whole lot easier if radical ideologies
were in fact bunkum. The problem is, the jihadis hold far too many
theological trump cards from the Qur’an and the precedent of Muhammad’s example
to be so easily routed on the field of ideas.Indeed it is the radicals who have become expert at debunking, as their
successful global recruiting drive shows.

Let
us consider some of the weight behind the radicals’ theology.

According
to Islamic law, Christians and other non-Muslims who agree to keep their
religion and their lives by paying jizya are subject to a dhimma treaty of
surrender.

The
word dhimma is derived from an Arabic word meaning ‘to blame’. It implies
a liability or debt arising from fault or blame. The idea is that the
non-Muslims, known as dhimmis, owe a debt to their conquerors for their lives,
and non-observance of the treaty of surrender would attract blame and thus
incur punishment. The dhimma conditions include payment of jizya by adult men,
but also many demeaning legal disabilities which are enforced upon non-Muslims
and apply in one form or another across most of the Muslim world right up to
the present day: one example is widespread restrictions on building new
churches in areas formerly conquered by Islam; another is restrictions on
freedom of religious expression.

The
imposition of these disabilities upon non-Muslims is in accordance with a
command of Muhammad:

‘…
I have been sent with a sword in my hand to command people to worship Allah and
associate no partners with him. I command you to belittle and subjugate those
who disobey me,for whoever imitates a people is one of
them’ (cited from the Musnad Ahmad Ibn Hanbali, founderof the Hanbali school of jurisprudence).

One
of the means of belittling non-Muslims has been to ensure that they would not
‘look alike’, by requiring that they wear discriminatory clothing, patches or
even, in ancient times, seals around their necks.

A
modern-day manifestation of the principle of not ‘looking alike’ is the
application of the Arabic letter nun (for Nazrani, the Arabic word for
Christians) to the exterior of Christian homes in Mosul. Using similar
reasoning, the Taliban required that Afghan Hindus should wear discriminatory patches
on their clothing, so their non-Muslim status could be instantly recognizable.

IS
is even looking to the model of first century Islam to set the level of the
jizya tax. Early Islamic sources state that the jizya was a minimum of
one gold dinar, and up to four dinars, depending upon the wealth of the
individual dhimmi. Following these provisions to the letter, IS has made the
following declaration:

‘Christians
are obligated to pay Jizya tax on every adult male to the value of four golden
dinars for the wealthy, half of that for middle-income citizens and half of
that for the poor . . .they must not
hide their status, and can pay in two instalments per year.’

A
gold dinar weighs about 4.5 grams, which at $45 a gram means that a tax regime
of one to four dinars equates to $200 to $800 US dollars per non-Muslim adult
male. This is a heavy burden for a conquered people in a war zone, and
the reality on the ground in both Syria and Iraq has been that the jihadis
demand much more, and not once a year as its textbooks state, but again and
again.

Reports
show that IS has been setting jizya so high in both Syria and northern Iraq,
and levying it so often, that it cannot be paid. This gives Christians
who wish to stay in their homes but two choices: convert or die. Most
have fled, but some, including those who are too frail or disabled to flee,
have had to convert to save themselves. The fleeing refugees are in a
particularly desperate situation, because they are progressively stripped of
their belongings by IS checkpoints as they escape.

There
is nothing new here. Throughout history the jizya has been a heavy
imposition for non-Muslims. Large numbers of Christians converted to
Islam in the early centuries of Islamic rule in order to avoid this tax.
Dionysius, a Syrian patriarch writing in the eighth century, reported that the
jizya often had to be extracted from Christians by beatings, extortion,
torture, rape and killings. Many fled destitute from town to town after
they had sold everything they owned to pay the tax.

Arthur
Tritton reported in The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects about
eighth-century Egypt that for ordinary day labourers the jizya tax was around a
quarter of annual earnings, or ten times the zakat tax paid by
Muslims. Shlomo Dov Goitein, writing on the situation of Jews in medieval
Egypt, reported that men would enslave themselves or their family to pay the
tax. Centuries after Dionysius of Antioch, he also reported that many,
having sold all they had to pay it, took to wandering homeless as beggars.

The
treatment of captives by IS is also in accordance with orthodox rules of war in
Islam, which permit men to be killed, while women and children are
enslaved. Sex slavery – concubinage – is permitted by the sharia
principles which guide IS. The Reliance of the Traveller – a
respected Sunni manual of sharia law – states: ‘When a child or a woman is
taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s
previous marriage is immediately annulled’ (chapter o9.13). The option of
converting to Islam to avoid death or capture – which is being urged upon
non-Muslims by IS – is also clearly supported: ‘Whoever enters Islam before
being captured may not be killed or his property confiscated, or his young
children taken captive’ (chaptero9.12).

The
widespread looting of property is also validated by Islam’s rules of war: ‘A
free male Muslim who has reached puberty and is sane is entitled to the spoils
of battle when he has participated in a battle to the end of it’ (chapter o10.1).
And ‘Anyone who … kills one of the enemy or effectively incapacitates him,
risking his own life thereby, is entitled to whatever he can take from the
enemy, meaning as much as he can take away with him in the battle, such as a
mount, clothes, weaponry, money or other’ (chaptero10.2).

The
grim reality is that the fate of Christians and Yazidis in northern Iraq today
all too often matches the stipulations of Islamic textbooks: non-Muslim men are
killed, their women and children enslaved, and their property and possessions
looted.

It
is regrettable that the hard cold reality of Islamic imperialism and the dhimma
system have been denied and obscured by scholars. For example Bernard
Lewis claimed that ‘The dhimma on the whole worked quite well.’

As
part of this obscurantist veil, the true meaning of the words jizya and dhimma
have been hidden by scholars.

Anglican
priest Colin Chapman, who was the then Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy to
Al-Azhar University in Cairo, claimed in his widely-ready book Cross and
Crescent that Jews and Christians were ‘protected’ and implied that the
jizya was paid in compensation for them not doing military service or paying
the Muslims’ alms tax (zakat). In reality the main protection afforded to
dhimmis is that they can keep their heads away from the sword of jihad, and it
was in return for this privilege that the jizya is exacted. John Esposito
similarly
claimed
that jizya is an ‘exchange’ in return for keeping one’s religion, protection
from ‘outside aggression’, and exemption from military service.

Such
dissimulations, also advanced by Muslim apologists, have served to prop up the
myth of convivencia and a golden age in which Christians and Muslims
lived contentedly side by side under Islamic rule.

Architects
of multiculturalism and advocates of interfaith dialogue have repeatedly
promoted this mythical Islamic construct as a model for different religions to
flourish side by side in Europe today. This has gone hand in hand with
the claims that European culture owes an unacknowledged debt to Islam, and
Islam’s historical record has been misrepresented by hateful, bigoted people.

In
reality Islamic coexistence with conquered Christian populations was always
regulated by the conditions of the dhimma, as defined above, under which
non-Muslims have no inherent right to life, but had to purchase this right year
after year.

Wilful
historical ignorance has been deeply debilitating for the intellectual elites
of the West, who feel righteous in dismissing evidence which contradicts their
corrupted worldview, on the grounds that they are taking a stand against the
bigotry of Islamophobia. They have been schooled in this self-hatred by their
Muslim dialogue partners.

Also
debilitating has been the trend among scholars to deny or downplay the military
meaning of jihad. An extreme example is Yale theologian Miroslav Volf’s
preposterous claim that the use of military force to expand Islam is ‘rejected
by all leading Muslim scholars today’.

The
promotion of the idea of the ‘greater jihad’ as a personal spiritual struggle
has also served to distract western leaders, such as CIA director John Brennan,
who stated that ‘jihad is a
holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s
community’.

In
reality the meaning of jihad in all sharia textbooks is warfare against
unbelievers. If the true meaning of jihad was a spiritual struggle with
the self, IS would not be attracting so many willing volunteers from around the
globe to the killing fields of Syria and Iraq.

There
is a chronic and urgent need for a dialogue of civilizations between Islam and
the post-Christian West. However this dialogue cannot be based upon
myths. At the top of the agenda must be the twin institutions of jihad and the
dhimma. It is essential for Western people to emphatically reject and
stigmatize these two pillars of Islamic law, and to deplore to Muslims their
application both throughout history and in the contemporary world.

One
of the effects of enforced cultural blindness and intellectual amnesia is
rampant theological illiteracy among Western policy makers. This is now having
the direst of consequences for Christians and others in the Middle East.
Those who managed the Western occupation of Iraq were deeply ignorant of the
dangers to non-Muslim minorities posed by the Islamic revivalism combined with
Western inference, and in particular by the re-establishment of the
jihad-dhimma system. They overlooked the fact that re-establishing the dhimma
has always been part of the agenda of Islamic revivalist movements. They
did not grasp that jihad war zones always prove especially deadly to
non-Muslims, even when the main conflict is between Muslims.

It
had also been forgotten that advances in the rights of non-Muslim populations
across the Middle East – such as the official dismantling of dhimma laws by the
Ottomans in the mid-nineteenth century – were only achieved due to sustained
political and military pressure from the Great Powers, and at the cost of
suppressing mainstream Islamic dogmas. Indeed this ‘humiliation’ of Islam
is one of the very things the global Islamic revival is supposed to be winding
back: this is why the deterioration of the human rights of non-Muslim
minorities – from Malaysia to Egypt – has been so marked in recent
decades.

Today
Islamic revivalist dogmas, which have become deeply entrenched in Muslim
communities both throughout the West and in Muslim majority states, eulogize
Islam’s glory days, when Christians and other non-Muslims paid jizya to keep
their heads. Revivalists look forward to a time when sharia principles,
implemented through unfettered jihad, will enforce the view that non-Muslims do
not have an inherent right to life, but only a conceded right for which they
must compensate Muslims in gold. We need not be surprised or shocked when
young men from around the globe, reared on this poisonous theological cocktail,
volunteer for jihad in Syria and Iraq to usher in a longed-for Islamic
utopia. It should not shock us that they have no qualms about shedding
non-Muslim blood.

The
effect of the cultural jihad, waged not only by Muslim apologists, but also by
western élites, is that Western policy makers have become blind to the enormity
of present-day non-Muslim suffering under the yoke of Islam, for they have no
reference points to comprehend it. To engage with this suffering and
develop policies to counter it would require acknowledgement of its root
causes, namely the theological framework of jihad and the dhimma, but that is
simply too frightening for societies who have multicultural dogmas rusted onto
their psyches, having embraced a false view of history and stubbornly
obscurantist views about theology.

As
long as policy makers continue to seek intellectual solace in calls for
‘conflict resolution’ and ‘reconciliation’, the vulnerable will continue to be
killed, raped and looted in the name of Islamic revivalism. The lives of
tens of thousands of vulnerable and peaceful Christians, Yazidis and others,
whose crime is that their religion is unacceptable, now hang in the balance in
northern Iraq, while the West sits paralyzed on the side lines, stunned and
stupefied by the lies it has told itself for so many years.

This
is not to say that reconciliation is unnecessary. Usama Bin Ladin got it
right when he asserted that the doctrine of the three choices is the crux of
the West’s problem with Islam: ‘The West avenges itself against Islam for
giving infidels but three options’:

‘Our
talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve
around one issue – one that demands our total support, with power and
determination, with one voice – and it is: “Does Islam, or does it not, force
people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not
spiritually?” [The answer is:] Yes. There are only three choices in Islam:
either willing submission; or payment of the jizya, through physical though not
spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or the sword – for it is not
right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for every person
alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.’

Bin
Ladin was right about this, that Islam’s doctrine of three choices, encompassing
the theological institutions of jihad and the dhimma, is and must be the
central issue for the West in its dialogue with the Islamic world. An
understanding of this doctrine and its implications for the human rights of
non-Muslims should be a cornerstone of public policy in relation to Islam, both
now and in the foreseeable future.

This
will not be an easy or comfortable dialogue, judging from the howls of protest
which greeted Pope Benedict’s comparatively mild Regensburg lecture in
2006. Yet appeasement of howling objectors through conflict-avoidance manoeuvers
will bring nothing but grief, as we are seeing in northern Iraq.

According to the ‘Vicar of
Bagdad’,
Canon Andrew White, what is needed right now to help non-Muslim victims of
Islamic jihadism is three things: Protection, Provision and
Perseverance. The lie foisted upon the world was that there was nothing
non-Muslims needed to be protected from.

Right
now IS’s victims deserve military intervention, food, water, shelter and medical
supplies. Many will need permanent sanctuary outside of their homelands.

Longer
term, much more is needed. Certainly the will to persevere, because the
world is in but the early stages of a (now resumed) centuries-long war with
militant Islam, but above all, in order to make sustained progress in the long
struggle ahead, we will require a greater appetite for the truth.

=====

Mark Durie is a theologian,
human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg
Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and director of the Institute for
Spiritual Awareness. He has published many articles and books on the language
and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom.
A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of
Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT,
UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities in 1992.

11 comments:

Thank you for posting this article. I came to understand Islam after the honour killings of girls and women in North America. My reading and investigations, meetings with Muslims (both Sunni and Shia) have helped me learn about the natural consequences of an expanding Islamic population in a non-Muslim country. Nobody should be surprised by these atrocities.

Another compelling article from which I shall borrow shamelessly.. It's also extremely interesting to read such salient quotes from bin Laden as I am far less familiar with his words than I am with his ghastly "works".

There is something I have heard recently which has confused me somewhat, and it would be immensely helpful if you or one of your readers could help me understand. There have been reports recently of IS members threatening to descend on Mecca and destroy the ka'aba brick by idolatrous brick. Now I know they've been busy demolishing mosques built over tombs in Iraq and Syria and understand the motivation, but the ka'aba seems a whole other kettle of fish. Don't these particular Muslims pray towards their sacred mosque, and don't they believe in performing hajj? And what about the example of Mohammed - surely he would have destroyed the ka'aba if Allah had willed it?

Gabriella - that story about destroying the ka'aba is most likely a slander made up against ISIS in order to discredit them. It came from the twitter account of an alleged ISIS member, but most likely it was fabricated for propaganda purposes. The reason is that veneration of the kaaba is based upon Muhammad's example. ISIS will destroy shrines and venerated tombs, but not, I think, the kaaba.

Mark, that was 4323 words, a lot of reading requiring a great deal of understanding and memory to comprehend and form an opinion on. Let alone to act upon.I thank you for all the info but could you condense this into something that is a bit more understandable please. What I would like to take away from this is what lies at the core of this huge problem and how do we tackle it? I have an idea, but could be totally wrong, that is, if turning the other cheek could ever be wrong. Where do we draw the line between loving and fighting our enemies? Have we as a Christian civilization reached the point where we have to suffer the consequences for imperialistic colonization and exploitation of the Middle and far East and more and for own own materialism and a moral decadence ?

See http://www.lapidomedia.com/academics-lied-about-nature-jihad-extraordinary-claim-increases-government-pressure-rescue-iraq-s-te for a shorter summary of my article by Jenny Taylor. Islamic violence is not at all due to Western colonization or exploitation.

I think you're right about the West's theological illiteracy in it's posture to Islam. The broad signal we seem to transmit is that peaceful secularism is better than radical Islam. However, we fail to realize that such an appeal is likely to drive more idealists to join the fight in Syria because our "weak" ideology is the very thing they detest. We have to engage the fundamentals of Islam, which means also facing up to our own failure to engage questions of God, religion and faith.

One of these fundamentals has to be the relationship between the religious authority and the ordinary believer. I can't speak for Muslims, but I see many of them turning away from the "authorities" that urge them to fight. I worry that these "moderates" (whom the West's appeal seems to be mainly aimed at) might have the right instincts, but they don't have the theological reasoning to sustain them, especially when the thrust of the Islamic enterprise is all about dominance. Where, in Islam, do we see nobility given to forbearance and service? And, if those narratives exist, can we justifiably promote them as a ideological counter-offensive against the voices of war?

Finally, on a very minor note, I recall that Cardinal Ratzinger had not been elected Pope when he gave his Regensburg address in 2006. I read it. The remarks that so offended Muslims were made in a reported dialog between a Christian and a Moslem in the Ottoman Court. Ratzinger used this dialog to explore the question of whether it was justifiable to advance the religious cause by force. Ratzinger said "no", and the Islamists cried foul. I wonder if these are the same Islamists in Syria, who are now doing the very thing they previously denied?

Just today, The Australian records ASIO Director general David irvine describing the violence in Syria and Iraq as "self-righteous, twisted and I suspect hate-filled interpretation of one of the world's great and enriching traditions: Islam". The reality could not be further from the truth. There has been nothing great or enriching about Islam in its 14 century history of bloodshed. Gabriel Hingley

Thank you for sharing your knowledge on this subject and articulating it so well. What is happening to minorities in the middle east at the hands of Islamic jihadists is history repeating itself. I pray that this will cause an awakening across the globe to this evil which must be addressed - and indeed that many will see the truth and be freed.

Thank you for this fine article which is very helpful for any of my readers wanting to learn more about Islam. So I've linked this to my blog at http://richards-watch.org/2014/11/18/catholic-and-orthodox-churches-cave-in-to-7th-century-muslim-edict/ refers)